[alano]

Hi folks

We are organising our annual challenge match against local rival team. To date we have done a simple Teams of 8 arrangement with 2 pairs from each team sitting NS and the other 2 EW.

This year however, more people are desparate to play so we decided to try for a teams of 10 event to see how it goes! The only problem is ... how can we score it fairly?

Does anyone know of a movement that would let this work? If not I'm going to have to try to work one out from scratch....

Cheers
Alan

[Gerben42]

Well I don't know of any. We did a team of 6 once like this:

At one table the teams sit in one direction. At the other two tables the team sit in the other direction. Both pairs at the last two tables compare with the first table, so the first table, the anchor table, counts double.
Play 3 segments so that each pair is anchor once.

With 5 pairs you can probably have two tables in one direction and three in the other and let all three tables compare with all two tables, and then make sure everyone is in the 2-table direction twice and in the 3-table direction three times.

[helene_t]

We played with eight pairs against 14 pairs from another club. Cross-IMPs, and the average of our eight pairs were compared to the average of the 14 from the other club.

(In our case, at three tables pairs from the other club played aganst each other, which was obsolete as far as the team match was conserned, but scores for individual pairs were computed as well).

[alano]

Gerben42, on Mar 31 2005, 05:59 AM, said:

With 5 pairs you can probably have two tables in one direction and three in the other and let all three tables compare with all two tables, and then make sure everyone is in the 2-table direction twice and in the 3-table direction three times.

Yes, thanks for this idea, it certainly works. I can get it fairly well balanced with 5 sets of 5 boards.

If all the boards are flat the end result is a tie so it has to be right. It seems to take the lie of the cards out of the equation which is the important thing. Plus it looks like fun! No pressure if a tricky grand slam comes up while you're at the Anchor Table then

Alan

[inquiry]

Many years ago there was an article about how two teams of 6 played a match with 24 boards in teh time of something like 16 boards...

If I remember correctly, and I probably don't, all six members of one team sat NS at all three tables (sounds strange at first).... and they played 8 boards. After these boards players all changed tables with the team that was NS at all three tables switching to EW. They then played 8 boards. So at the end of the two rounds of play, everybody had played 16 boards. But there were 24 boards for comparison. Each team played NS on the hands one round, and EW on the hands the next round.

How you would do this 5 people on a team, well, that is anybody's guess... odd man out and all.

Ben

[cherdano]

I think Ben's suggestion would work just the same with 5 pairs. Play 8 boards with all team-one-pairs sitting NS. Pass the boards to the next table, with everyone swapping seats, and replay the 8 boards. Overall, you get 40 comparisons.

Or, next version: Again team1 sitting NS at all tables. Play 4 boards, pass them on. Replay the 4 boards, still team1 sitting NS. Then everybody swaps position, and the boards are passed on, replayed, passed on once more and replayed. Then e.g. boards 1 - 4 would have been played at table 1 & 2 with team1 sitting NS, and at tables 3 & 4 sitting EW.

Maybe Gerben's version is more fun though, where everybody gets 2 "big" sets that count 1.5 times as much.

Arend

[alano]

More suggestions I've had include playing as 4 pairs but each pair sitting out, and using Butler scoring (?) to pair the 5th pairing with the average from the 1st four.

A

[Gerben42]

When I read Ben's post I thought about the same thing Arend described so it must be the canonical way of setting this up.

Advantage of "my" method: Everyone plays all boards (good for chatting).
Advantage of "Ben's" method: No weighting.

In fact the "not playing all boards" part is not so bad. You get two 20-board team matches in the time a 2-pair team would play 16 boards once.

Double proportions rule

For those who not know what all these double proportions are about think about an old puzzle by Lewis Carroll (1880):

If 6 cats kill 6 rats in 6 minutes, how many will be needed to kill 100 rats in 50 minutes?

[alano]

Just as a brief postscript to this one, two people were sick so in the end it defaulted to a straightforward 4 table teams match.

Pity......................... (though we did win! )

Still it might happen next year!